← Driving Test

Features

Everything the examiner watches for, what the city does while it watches, and what you need to run any of it.

What is being marked

The examiner names the turns. What you do between them is the part being scored, and that is what catches people out.

You start on 100 points. Faults are named on screen the moment they happen, so a drive never ends with you guessing which bit of it went wrong. Finish the route on 70 or more and you pass.

These three do not deduct. In an examined drive they end it where it stands:

  • Hitting a pedestrian
  • Running a red light
  • Colliding with anything

The same fault will not be recorded twice in a row for a few seconds, so one long mistake costs you once instead of twenty times.

The watch list

mirror checkssignallingred lightsspeed controlkeeping clearlane disciplinelane markingsgap choiceroundaboutspedestrian crossingscyclist clearancehill startsparking accuracy

Not all of it on every map. A map is marked on what it actually contains, so a quiet grid with no roundabout on it has no roundabout faults to give you.

The two ways of looking

A mirror check and a shoulder check are recorded separately, because they show you different things. A mirror covers the road you have already driven through. A shoulder check covers the piece of road beside you that no mirror reaches.

A turn accepts either. You are not moving sideways into a space someone may already be occupying, so the glance down the road that a mirror gives you counts as having looked.

Anything sideways needs the shoulder check specifically: changing lane, merging off a slip road, reversing. Turning your head costs you the road ahead for a moment, and judging when to accept that cost is part of driving.

A look only counts if you took it in the 11 seconds before the manoeuvre began. Checking once the car is already moving across is not observation of anything: you are looking at a decision you have made. If you have been held at a light longer than that, the examiner wants the look again, because the road behind you has changed since you last saw it.

Both are counted while you drive. A badge flashes the moment a check is credited, the HUD carries the share of manoeuvres you looked before, and the end-of-drive report gives the shoulder-check percentage on a line of its own, so you can watch the habit forming instead of guessing at it.

The indicator is yours to work

Nothing signals for you. Signalling is a decision about telling other people what you intend to do, and a simulator that made that decision on your behalf would be marking its own homework.

Turning, changing lane and merging are each marked on whether you signalled first. Where a turn on red is allowed, the examiner reads the indicator before deciding whether you were entitled to go at all.

It cancels itself the way a column stalk does. Steer through a real turn's worth of angle and it drops out on its own; on a lane change or a merge it clears once the examiner has finished judging the manoeuvre, so the signal is still on while you are moving across and gone by the time you need the next one.

Junctions, in more detail than you might like

A stop sign is timed. Stopping is not enough on its own, and stopping short of the full time is marked as a different fault from never stopping at all, because they are different mistakes. Hold it properly and the examiner says so.

A give way sign is judged on whether there was anything to give way to. Arriving far too fast is marked on its own, even when the road turns out to be clear.

Amber is not an order to stop. It is a question about whether you could have, and the answer depends on where you were when it asked, so it is judged on stopping distance instead of on the colour you saw.

Driving on the right, a turn on the kerb side of a red light is allowed after a complete stop, with the indicator on. Driving on the left, a red light is a red light.

Roundabouts

Entry priority is marked: you give way to the traffic already going round. Which side that traffic comes from is a fact about the country, not about the junction. Drive on the left and it comes from your right. Drive on the right and it comes from your left.

The priority, the direction of circulation and the side you are told to check all come from the same place, so the coaching cannot tell you one thing while the marking expects another.

Lane changes and slip roads

A lane change wants the signal and the shoulder check. The mirror is deliberately not marked here: the door mirrors are on screen the whole time you drive, so faulting the keypress would be scoring the interface instead of the driving. A blind spot is not on screen at all, and nothing except turning your head puts it there.

Merging wants more. Whether you signalled, whether you looked at all and whether the looking included a shoulder check are recorded separately, since a driver who read the mirrors and stopped there has made a different mistake from one who did nothing. So is running out of acceleration lane, and so is cutting in too close in front of the car you have just joined, which is the mistake people make while congratulating themselves on finding the gap.

Speed is judged against the traffic you are joining and not against the posted limit, so matching a queue that is crawling is correct. The window for the looking opens when you join the auxiliary lane, not when you cross into traffic, so a check taken at the top of the slip road still stands.

Both parking manoeuvres

Reverse bay parking and parallel parking are both here, in the practice area built around them. The examiner starts watching once you are close, and only counts it as an attempt when you actually select reverse, so queueing beside a bay is not a failed park.

Before you reverse it wants a shoulder check, and a mirror will not stand in for it. This is where that distinction stops being academic: a door mirror shows you the road you came down, not the ground your own boot is about to occupy.

There is a limit on shunts instead of a ban on them, since a correction is part of parking and shuffling back and forth until it happens to come right is not. In the car park the wheel stop behind the bay is marked if you reach it, and so is a knocked cone. The finish is judged on the whole car being inside the box, corner by corner: a middle in the right place will happily belong to a car left at an angle across two bays.

Hill starts

Roll backwards while the car is still in Drive and keep rolling, and that is faulted as a rollback. A moment of roll while your foot moves between the pedals is what hills do and is not the fault. Rolling on past that is the car deciding what happens next instead of you.

There is a short grace period at the start of a drive, so settling into the seat is not scored.

The rest of the marking sheet

The set pieces are not the whole of it. Ordinary driving is marked continuously.

Speed is checked against the limit that district actually posts, which is not always the one on the sign you passed a mile back. Passing a cyclist inside the clearance your region asks for is marked. So is failing to give way at a pedestrian crossing, driving in a bus lane or a car-pool lane you are not entitled to use, staying in a lane that is closed ahead, and turning out of a lane whose arrows did not permit that turn.

Four ways to drive

Examined, practice and learn are one choice on the launch screen, not three switches, so a drive is in exactly one of them.

Practice mode is the one to spend your time in. In a real test the drive stops at the red light you ran, and you never find out how the rest of it would have gone, so the part you most needed to practise becomes next month's problem. Practice mode makes the critical faults cost points instead of ending the drive. The fault is still named. You still lose for it, and you keep going.

Free roam has no switch. It is what the whole-city maps are, so picking one is picking it, while the lesson maps stay examined, practice or learn.

The examiner speaks

Directions are spoken aloud with the browser's own speech synthesis, so there is nothing extra to install and no audio to download. Lines are queued instead of cut off, and if two pile up the newer one wins, because a stale instruction is not worth hearing.

In learn mode the examiner talks the turn, the roundabout and the parking manoeuvre through before you need them, instead of naming the fault afterwards. It says which mirror, which way to signal and which shoulder to check. Then it says why, and the why is the point. "Check your blind spot" teaches a ritual. "Check your blind spot, a cyclist can be coming up the inside where the mirror cannot see them" teaches you something you will still be doing years after the test.

Every coaching line is written on screen in short form as well as spoken, so learn mode still works with the voice off. The voice can be switched off in settings, and there is a mute key. Elsewhere the coaching stays quiet, because being told the answer is not the same exercise as remembering it.

Traffic that changes with the district

Busyness is a density per kilometre of road, not a fixed number of cars. A flat count only means something once you know how much road there is, and the amount of road loaded around you changes as you drive.

A profile sets vehicles per kilometre and the share of those that are lorries, buses or bicycles. It sets the pavement too: how many people are on it, how many of them are children, and how likely one is to step into the road away from a crossing. It decides how full the parked cars are and how many of them will reverse off a driveway as you come past. The quiet profile has cyclists about and cars sitting on driveways; the busy one puts lorries and buses into the mix and fills more of the parking.

A district is a painted area of the map. It can override the speed limit inside it, how its junctions are controlled, how busy it is and what gets built there, and anything it does not mention is inherited from the map, so a district can be one line long. Total the road up first and a city centre and a suburb average into one middling figure, which is how a big map ends up feeling like the same street repeated. Counted cell by cell instead, the busy squares spawn busy traffic and the quiet ones stay quiet, on the same drive, a minute apart.

Things that happen without warning

The city does not wait for you. Several things in it are waiting to arrive at a moment you did not pick.

An ambulance comes up behind you with lights and siren, and the examiner expects you at the kerb and stopped inside a window. The spot it wants clears the traffic lane without asking you to park on top of a parked car. Ignore it and it is called out on screen.

In a school zone a crossing patrol steps out with a lollipop stick and walks a group of children across, and traffic, yours included, has to stop. In a residential street, cars sitting on driveways reverse out as you come along. They stop if you get close, so hitting one is a decision you made rather than something done to you.

Near a playground a ball rolls into the road and a child runs out after it. That one only fires when you are far enough back to stop, so it is survivable every time. The lesson is not that a ball is dangerous. It is that the ball is the warning you get before the child, and it is the only warning you are going to get.

Which side of the road

Left-hand and right-hand traffic are both supported, chosen in settings with a region picker, and it is not a cosmetic switch. The side you are asked to check, the side a roundabout gives way to and the turn that crosses oncoming traffic all follow from it, so the coaching asks for the shoulder that will actually be marked without keeping a second version of the words.

10 maps, in 4 groups

Lessons that each teach one thing, roads that ask for lane discipline at speed, a quiet grid to practise the manoeuvres on, and a whole city to drive around with nobody marking you. Every map is listed with its limits, its size and roughly how long it takes on the home page.

Keyboard, gamepad or touch

A key is on or off, while a stick and a trigger are not, so on a pad you can hold a quarter of a turn or half the brake. That is most of what smooth driving is. Plug one in mid-drive and it is picked up without a setting to find.

Gamepad

Right trigger
Throttle
Left trigger
Brake
Left stick
Steer left · Steer right
A
Handbrake
Left bumper
Look in the left mirror
Right bumper
Look in the right mirror
Right stick, left
Shoulder check, left
Right stick, right
Shoulder check, right
D-pad left, or right stick up
Indicate left
D-pad right, or right stick down
Indicate right
B
Drive / reverse
Y
Camera view
X
Horn
Start
Pause

Any standard-layout controller, Xbox and PlayStation pads included. A browser will not report a pad as connected until it has received its first input, so if nothing happens when you plug one in, press a button on it once.

Keyboard

W
Throttle
S
Brake
A
Steer left
D
Steer right
Space
Handbrake
Q
Look in the left mirror
E
Look in the right mirror
←
Shoulder check, left
→
Shoulder check, right
↑
Indicate left
↓
Indicate right
R
Drive / reverse
C
Camera view
H
Horn
M
Mute
P
Pause
Esc
Abandon the test

The two looks are worth knowing by heart, since they are the most-marked thing in the game. On a pad the bumpers glance at the door mirrors and the right stick is held over for the shoulder check: held, not flicked, because you look for as long as you hold it, the same way turning your head works.

Touchscreen

GAS
Throttle
BRAKE
Brake
◀ on the deck
Steer left
▶ on the deck
Steer right
Hold the left mirror, or swipe left
Shoulder check, left
Hold the right mirror, or swipe right
Shoulder check, right
Tap the left mirror
Indicate left
Tap the right mirror
Indicate right
D / R, under the speed
Drive / reverse
The button top right
Pause

A control deck docks along the bottom edge — steering under your left thumb, the pedals under your right, the speed between them — and the dial, the minimap and the gear box give up their space to it. It appears the first time you touch the screen and goes away again the first time you drive on the keys, so a tablet with a keyboard attached shows whichever one you are using rather than whichever one it has. Portrait and landscape both work.

There is no room on a phone for a button per binding, so the door mirrors do double duty. Tap the one you are turning towards and the indicator comes on, and that glass lights amber for as long as it is blinking. Hold one and you look over that shoulder — a swipe across the road does the same thing when your thumb is nowhere near the mirror. The look does not begin until the press outlasts a fifth of a second, so tapping to signal never quietly earns the credit for a blind-spot check you did not make.

That is the one thing touch could not do without: the shoulder check is the only observation the marking sheet actually scores, so a driver who had no way to make one would lose points on every lane change with no control to prevent it. What touch does give up is the horn, the camera views and magnifying a mirror — and nothing marks any of those.

What you need to run it

Any browser with WebGL 2 will run it, on a desktop, a tablet or a phone. There is nothing to install and no account to create. The drive itself runs entirely in your browser, and the only thing that ever leaves it is the analytics you have to opt into.

On a phone the whole test is drivable with two thumbs, in portrait or landscape, and nothing is scored differently for it — the same marking sheet, the same critical faults, the same pass mark.

Start driving